Sketches in Christian Origins

Ehrman, "Forgery of an Ancient Discovery?" in Lost Christianities

Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

Speaking of forgeries, today I received a copy of Bart Ehrman’s latest book on lost Christian texts and sects. The first part relates to four forgeries and their discoveries: (1) Gospel of Peter: “Ancient Discovery of a Forgery”; (2) Acts of Paul and Thecla: “Ancient Forgery of a Discovery”; (3) Gospel of Thomas: “Discovery of an Ancient Forgery”; and (4) Secret Mark: “Forgery of an Ancient Discovery?”.

It is the last one that particularly interests me, since the only fragments of Secret Mark are quotations in a letter of Clement of Alexandria copied onto the endpapers of a book discovered by Morton Smith in 1958 at the monastery of Mar Saba. Clement, of course, is the author of Hypotyposeis, for which this weblog is named.

After laying out all the suspicious circumstances of the discovery, publication, and contents of Secret Mark and the Mar Saba Clementine, Ehrman does not come to a firm conclusion: “I am not willing to say that Smith … forged the letter of Clement which he claimed to discover. My reasons should be obvious. As soon as I say that I am certain he did so, those pages cut from the back will turn up, someone will test the ink, and it will be from the eighteenth century!” (p. 89) This echoes Ehrman’s comments published earlier this summer that “to argue that Smith fabricated eighteenth century ink would be a bit of stretch.” Ehrman, “Response to Charles Hedrick’s Stalemate,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 11 (2003): 160.

I’m not so sure, however, that dating the ink on the Mar Saba Clementine would be as conclusive as Ehrman seems to suggest. Although accurate forensic techniques exist today for dating modern, slow-drying ball-point pen inks, there are many problems associated with testing ink on medieval documents, as this news release from Brookhaven National Laboratories explains in reference to the Vinland Map case:

Several previous studies challenging the map’s authenticity have focused on the chemical composition of the ink used to draw it. Some initial work found anatase, a particular form of titanium dioxide, in the ink. Since anatase only went into commercial production in the 20th century, some concluded that the ink was also a 20th-century product, making the map a forgery. Recent testing, however, only revealed trace quantities of titanium, whose presence may be a result of contamination, the chemical deterioration of the ink over the centuries, or may even have been present naturally in the ink used in medieval times. Another recent study detected carbon, which has also been presented as evidence of a forgery. However, carbon can also be found in medieval ink. Current carbon-dating technology does not permit the dating of samples as small as the actual ink lines on the map.

If the ink on the Mar Saba Clementine is to be tested, there is not enough of it to be carbon-dated, leaving us with the less conclusive examination of the ink’s chemical composition for consistency with known early modern inks. However, these chemical tests can be fooled by using recipes current in the eighteenth century. Therefore, while a chemical test of the ink might condemn the Mar Saba Clementine as a forgery, it is not clear to me that testing the ink can exonerate the letter if the result is consistent with early modern inks.

There is another problem with the focus on the physical testing of the letter. While physical testing is always important and often crucial to solving the case (e.g. the James Ossuary, the Joash Inscription, the Praenestine Fibula, etc.), critics have been detecting forgeries even when the physical specimens are unavailable. For example, the originals for the Gospel of Peter, the Acts of Paul and Thecla, and the Gospel of Thomas are forever lost, but that loss of the originals has not prevented scholars from concluding their spuriousness.

But we have a problem, what if the forger is a superior critic than his peers, as Morton Smith clearly was? As Quentin Quesnell put it: “No argument whatever, based on form and content alone, can eliminate the possibility of contemporary hoaxing. For any such argument can uncover the hoaxer only by detecting his mistakes. But a contemporary might always possess as much information about plausible form and content as the would-be detector, possess the same tools, know as much about the uncovering of earlier hoaxes.” Quesnell, “A Reply to Morton Smith,”Catholic Biblical Quarterly 38 (1976): 201 (footnote omitted). (The Quesnell-Smith exchange in CBQ is reprinted by permission online by Bryan Cox.)